January 25, 2006

tales from the mash pit

(Author's note: Chris Messina implored us to blog about Mash Pit. I didn't want to just parrot other excellent posts, so here's my demented version of the event.)

Four thirty. A.M., as in oh-dark-thirty. Ben and Karen will be asleep for another three hours. Uh huh. Why am I up this early? Because I have to leave for the airport in an hour. Uh huh. Why is that again? It takes me a moment to focus, to remember. Oh yes. It's because I go into berserker paroxysms of geeky hyperactivity whenever the triggerword API is spoken, and I don't stop until some kind soul utters the safeword.

In this case the fiend is Chris Messina, and the cause of the utterance is Mash Pit. It's the latest bud from the Bar Camp bush, a one-day test to see if meatspace interaction can produce cyberspace results. If successful, a number of Mash Pits would follow, each building on the the code and content of the last. It's in San Francisco, of course. I'm in San Diego, of course. "It's not that far," I think, glossing over the realities of security checkpoints, delays and AirBART. "The flight is barely as long as my old commute to Encinitas." Uh huh.

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January 12, 2006

Predictions for 2006

From a comment I posted over at Peter Caputa's blog:

The Web 2.17 design ethic replaces tiny grey text and big colorful images with tiny grey images and big colorful text. Flickr repurposes itself as a freefont archive.

Yahoo, Google, O'Reilly, and Apple merge into a company briefly named YaGooFoople, then renamed Web 2.0, which manages to acquire Microsoft just before disappearing in a puff of smoke and stock options.

The US Government creates a new RSS Bankruptcy Court to provide citizens relief from crushing attention debt. Options include "Chapter 1.3-NonAttribution" bankruptcy and the more popular "Chapter 1.1-ShareAlike", which provides debt restructuring across social networks.

Ha. I kill me.

October 03, 2005

taking web 2.0 up a notch

Brian Dear just posted a ginormous, well-thought-out post on where Eventful and EVDB fit in the Web 2.0 universe. It's primarily a response to Tim O'Reilly's post asking What is Web 2.0 but it's also leading up to the Web 2.0 conference this week.

I love how well we fit in this new ecosystem. I consider that a good sign, both about the Web 2.0 concept (it's not just a buzzword) and about EVDB itself. Like I've said before, it's really refreshing to work on something that's both on the cutting edge and well-received by the general public.

UPDATE: Tim O'Reilly posted a nice response to Brian's response:

Brian Dear's wonderful point by point analysis of how EVDB matches up with the points in my Web 2.0 meme map. I'd love to see more Web 2.0 companies giving this kind of feedback!

September 01, 2005

enablers

I can't believe it took me this long. I just realized that videophones, which I normally consider to be a nice-to-have addition to voice conversation (or chat), are an amazing leap forward for deaf person. In fact, it would probably make sense to offer a video-only version of such things, to save the bandwidth of a useless audio channel.

How many other "nice-to-have" features are we ignoring, instead of enabling uses we didn't expect?

June 25, 2005

back in the saddle again

It's good to be back on CPAN. It's been over a year since Apache::PSP went 1.0, and I haven't had much chance to come up with publicly-useful Perl modules since then. That's why it felt really good to post the EVDB::API module for work.

It's a spiffed-up version of a module Chuck (our CTO) wrote for internal use, but the fact that it's out there now makes it even cooler. (Well, that and the API it actually uses.) I'm actually starting to get excited in that "hey, someone's actually going to use this" sort of way.

If you're interested and have a Perl install laying around, try this:
perl -MCPAN -e 'install EVDB::API'
...and let me know what happens.

June 21, 2005

technorati hath failed me

...or at least annoyed me today.

I'm new to this Web 2.0 thing, but I've been getting up to speed over the last few weeks. To do so, I got hooked into Flickr, del.icio.us, and Technorati among others. More on all that later.

I've also been a bit busy at work, too, so I wasn't able to get back to Technorati for a week or two. When I did this morning, I found that (like usual) I'd forgotten the username and password I'd used. The usual suspects didn't do the trick, so I popped my e-mail address into the Forgot Password link like a good little user and proceeded to Gmail to get enlightened.

That's when it all started going wrong.

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